Representative government and representation--United States

Representative bureaucracy is one way to reconcile the need for administrative efficiency with the normative requirements of democracy. In theory, a representative bureaucracy is an organizational structure that permits decision-makers to act more quickly and more flexibly than an elected body. A representative bureaucracy is comprised of an employee composition that is more representation of the general public, at least in demographic terms, than legislative bodies. This research tests a number of hypotheses concerning the impact of individual attributes of delinquency case managers and of the organizational context in which they work on their intake recommendations to the office of the state attorney.

The politics-administration dichotomy has been one of the most disputed theories of public administration. Despite serious challenges and critics, neither the theoretical utility nor the normative power of the dichotomy has totally disappeared over the decades. The dichotomy has been advocated on the grounds that the dichotomous division of labor and authority between elected leadership and administrative leadership is prerequisite for autonomous (and effective) public administration. This dissertation (1) conceptualizes the politics-administration dichotomy, (2) specifies a theoretical model, and (3) tests and evaluates the theoretical model with empirical data collected from a nationwide sample of city managers serving in council-manager local governments. Results of structural equation modeling demonstrate that the internal theoretical logic of the politics-administration dichotomy could not be confirmed with empirical data. The dissertation then discusses implications of the findings for the field of public administration.